Hyla Skopitz looks at photography through the lens of video. She references the history of photography and its relationship to nostalgia and memory while disrupting “the decisive moment” and mourning the death of a particular kind of photography that no longer seems relevant since the proliferation of digital imaging and social media. In Skopitz’s reveries, photography becomes a metaphor for absence and presence, and video a means for processing loss.
Mar 1988 is comprised of Super 8 footage from home movies along with cell phone videos and photographs from my Instagram feed @goodbyla layered behind an analogue slide taped to a computer monitor. My father had created slide shows of historical and religious sites to share with his students and colleagues. The only slide I saved from his carousels was this one, an image with a light leak showing an airplane wing, clouds, and mountains framed by the curved window.
Contact was made shortly after a friend’s sudden death. In it, a contact sheet comes into focus through dust and scratches for a brief moment as a kettle climaxes into a whistle and the image is again obscured.
(Nostalgia) after Hollis Frampton is a homage to Hollis Frampton’s experimental film from the 1970s when he abandoned still photography for moving images. He filmed static shots of his photographs burning on a hot plate, turning to ash. In this video, exposed photographic paper is filmed swaying in trays of developer bath in the darkroom as the latent image is realized. The images, which I had shot as a young photography student, slowly emerge tinted red by dim “safe” lights. With the click of the pull chain, they are fully revealed by the overhead light for a moment until this “white” light turns them black, the image almost completely erased.